YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence Calcano

lines on the record: 67
first: 2026-05-01
most recent: 2026-05-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was an amazing speech. And one of the things he said is in his career, he's won, and I may get the numbers slightly off, 80% of his matches and 54% of his points. And his point was, it's just a point. And I think that's a huge lesson. It's just a point. It happened. You lost it. You won it. You lost it. You move on. I think that's great advice and advice I wish I had had when I was younger”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No doubt I think probably I'll generalize that a little bit is patience. I was sort of young and just, you know, hard charging and so forth. And as a lot of us are, but you just have to be patient. It's funny, we sponsor golfers. And I watch golf. I love golf. And you see people, they bogey holes. John Rom won the Masters a few years ago. He double bogeyed the first hole. I remember I was standing there watching it.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do they treat other people? How do they behave in meetings? That stuff that's super valuable osmosis learning, you don't get when you're sitting in your apartment on a Zoom screen. There's Zoom screen is one dimensional. Life is multidimensional. And so I'm a huge, my, some people in the company love this, some people don't, but I'm a huge work from the office person because I believe that that multidimensional experience is much more powerful and it's better for every individual from a learning perspective.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, you know, the world owes you nothing. This is, by the way, when I have several kids, you know, who have graduated college. And what I said to them, and I'd say to anyone at iCapital generally, the world owes you nothing. And what you get in this life is a function of what you work for. And I think that people need to be flexible. They need to have an open attitude. And that to me, at a given level of intelligence, that's what attitude makes the difference. It's funny, we all went through this work from home during COVID and now, you know, some people want to continue to work remotely. And when you asked about mentors, a lot of the mentorship that I got probably a lot of people got was just being in the office, watching people, listening to people. How do they act?”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finished Landman, love Landman. Looking forward to watching the Peeky Blinders movie, which we haven't seen. But probably, you know, when I get home, when I'm sort of, when I put the work down, my wife and I tend to watch shows together.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the so that I married 33 years. Same. And honestly, my wife and I are just binge watching a series of shows. We've gone through the whole Yellowstone saga, you know, the prequels. Did you get to?”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm overwhelmed with work reading right now between what we're doing in our business and client stuff. I'm reading a lot of stuff on AI that sort of, if I were to admit the honest thing is I keep reading new AI books about AI and technology, AI in general, there are a lot of incredibly positive things about AI. There are a lot of risks with AI and a couple of the books I've read recently were really focusing on the risks around unemployment, around control and governance. And when you get to natural intelligence, when AI reaches sort of human intelligence, what happens then? So there's a really exciting and bright side and there's really a dark side that's going to need a lot of governance to protect all of us.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boy, I had a lot of mentors growing up. And I think I always try to watch people and see what they did. There were several senior people at Goldman Sachs that I learned things from. I remember the head of investment banking once told me when I was like a young associate. He said the loneliest job on the planet is the CEO's job. So if you want to be a successful investment banker, make a friend of the CEO and be a sounding board and you'll have a good career. That was pretty good advice. But I remember the other piece of advice I got from another senior partner in banking was you always have to be an intellectual honest. And a lot of people are afraid to be intellectually honest because they're calculating what's happening in the room versus being true to what you think and saying it and not being afraid to do that. And I've tried to.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, I think the next big thing is the deep implementation of those technologies. We're still scratching the surface. Tokenization hasn't even hit. Private markets in any meaningful way yet, AI same. So I think there is significant application of those technologies will be meaningful. And I think really for the financial advisors, this reminds me 10 years ago when all the robos were coming out, you really had, and there was this big debate, robo advisors versus human advisors. And I always thought that was a false choice. I always thought the best answer for clients was a great financial advisor who leveraged technology to create an incredible experience for their clients. And I think the same is true today. The best financial advisors are going to not be afraid of technology. They're going to adopt it and they're going to embrace it to create an incredible client experience. And that's sort of how I think the market will evolve in a constructive and positive way.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for us, you know, we're really focused on helping people have very successful journeys with their private investments, their structured notes, annuities, et cetera. And so I think the way in which we will interact with the public markets will be more around these model portfolios I talked about and collaborating and partnering with the GPs and other sort of more of the public company, people who either provide models or have public investments, and helping to create these model packages for investors to be able to invest holistically in a portfolio. I think that's probably how we'll play the public space in partnership and in concert with people who are experts in that area.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of helping people understand what's happening, I think, generally speaking, that the industry, and when I say the industry, I mean the asset management industry has to be even more transparent today than ever before. And I think, by the way, that's a good thing going forward. I think the alternative asset managers probably need to be more disclosive, more transparent to clients over time. But I think being out in front of clients, helping them understand the landscape and what's going on has been a big part of how we've spent a lot of time. And one of the things we're doing now is trying to bring the organize the industry to get people on the GP side working together. I talked about transparency, getting information, educational material, not promotional material, but educational material to try to help create, again, a better and deeper level.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this is such a smaller magnitude than the TFC. I don't think that we're anywhere near those types of concerns. You know, we're big believers in communications. I made a point earlier about how the ecosystem needs to work together. It really needs to work together now.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the services we provide to clients is we help advisors aggregate client data because a client might have held away data in lots of different places that you want to aggregate so you can present a holistic picture to your client, how we get that data, how we retrieve the data, how we extract data from documents, and then how we reassemble AI can help drive a lot of that. So the applications of AI are sort of significant across our entire platform.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're actually, we have pilots going on across what we do. So if you take our tech stack, there are really two ways to think about it. One of which is the tech we use to empower clients and the technology that clients engage with. And the second is the technology we use to run our business. And there are big applications in both. And to give a couple of applications, when a manager comes to iCapital to raise a fund, we sort of build a subdoc. AI can build that sub doc for us very, very quickly. When a client comes to the site and wants to, they come to our marketplace and they want to describe to us what they're interested in and they hit toggles, et cetera. They go through a few steps to kind of inform us what they're interested in. AI can do that really, really quickly. There are a number of ways the way we collect data.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get more information over the next several quarters on where we are with private credit. But my guess is the portfolios are in a lot better shape than people think.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where we sit today, I think a lot of people are very anxious to understand what the underlying credit quality is in these products. And I think there's certainly disruptive forces from AI that we've talked about. The industry talks about every single day. It's not clear to me that the existing portfolios are really in bad shape. I actually think the portfolios are likely in better shape than people think. I've spent a lot of time trying to talk to various managers of both equity and credit as to what they're seeing in terms of adoption. And while everybody is working on how to implement AI, it's not like existing software vendors are seeing their businesses dry up. That's not happening. And a lot of those are the borrowers of these private credit assets. So we'll need to get.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has. And, you know, I would say that a lot of the private credit investments you could look at are floating rate. And so they still can provide opportunities for excess return, real alpha, because of the way they float. In fact, it was interesting in the early part of the century coming out of COVID, this decade, you had people, to your point, very actively buying private credit. And then when interest rates went up to like 5%, some people were earning like 10 to 12 percent on their private credit investments. And so they were then looking not about private credit versus public credit, they were looking at private credit at 10 or 12 percent versus private equity. And it being shorter duration was that the right mix for them. And then right now we're seeing a lot more people focusing on equity as well. But you definitely had a period of time where private credit was very, very attractive. And I think.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are the private markets are so much larger than the public markets. As you know, the public markets are increasingly dominated by a small number of stocks. And so accessing the private markets gives you access to a much broader set of possible investments. Again, not right for everybody, but for those who are looking to build more involved portfolios, there's an opportunity that the private markets enable you to pursue that you just don't get by buying just stocks and bonds.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's happened, which is a good thing, is clients have access to more products to potentially meet their needs. Doesn't mean these products, by the way, are right for everybody. They're probably not right for a lot of people. But for those that have the ability to make these investments, the willingness to tolerate the illiquidity we talked about before. These products provide more opportunities to build the right portfolio. You think about the public markets, I mean, you spend a lot of time thinking about them, I know. There are probably 150,000 private companies with sort of EBITDA or revenues greater than $100 million. And there are 5,000, 4,000 public companies.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Credit and real estate, or maybe it's multi asset where you've got all of that sort of wrapped together. We think there's lots of different ways. Every individual has a different set of needs and objectives. And so we think it's really important that there's a lot of flexibility in the system so people can allocate precisely what's important to a given client.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes time. You need to make sure that you have sort of persistent access to quality product across all the strategies, so equity, credit, real estate, infrastructure, et cetera, hedge funds. And so our platform tries to provide that. But that wealthy individual will probably use private funds to build it for the accredited investor. They'll probably use the registered funds to be able to build that. And they will either buy individual registered funds, or they might buy registered funds wrapped together. That's something that we're seeing a lot of the market due today where they'll wrap three or four or five different funds together to give people an exposure to maybe it's equity, maybe it's a growth-oriented product where there's sort of a buyout, a growth, a venture kind of component, or maybe it's an income-oriented product where you've got”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to build these portfolios. If you have a credit in equity portfolio, debt and equity portfolio, and you want to build them or rebalance them, you can do that with a few mouse clicks, right? With all, if you target an allocation, it's 10 or 15 or 20 percent, you've got to build that. So it's really important that you take time.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So I think for the, if I can maybe make some divisions by wealth, the wealthier clients have tended to buy the private funds, perhaps they'll invest either directly if they can make a $20 million investment or if not if they're a million, $5 million or whatever, they usually come through a vehicle that we'll set up for them to access. And then we aggregate that capital and we look like one large investor to the institution, to the GP. So the wealthier clients tend to invest through those private vehicles across the board. And we think from a platform perspective”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's an element to it that's super unproductive. So that's why we're in no rush to do that. You know, we want to make sure, as I said, we have a strong balance sheet, strong capital structure. Equity is an important part of our compensation for everybody. 100% of the employees have stock at iCapital. To me, that's a big cultural point in terms of bringing people together. But you need to, if you're going to provide that as part of someone's compensation, there needs to be some opportunity for people to get some liquidity. So over our history, we've provided four such opportunities for people to get a little liquidity. And as long as we stay private, we'll continue to try to find a way. It's limited, of course, but we try to find way for people to get some liquidity from their equity holdings.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, I think going public allows firms to have access to capital, to have growth, leverage their growth, provide secondary markets, if you will, for employees and other investors. You know, I think for us, we spend very little time actually thinking about that other than wanting to make sure we run the company with the discipline of a public company. We get our quarterly reports turned around, our monthly reports by the second day of every month, quarterly reports by the third day of the new quarter. And we turn the year-end results in a fast period of time as well. And so the process of being public creates some disciplines that we want to make sure we have. But it's not, you know, it's not something we're that focused on. There's two sides to every coin. You know, when you”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we don't need outside capital to run our business. I'm a believer, though, when you think about, we talked about the duration of these assets. When we talk to financial advisors, financial advisors have to know that we're financed to be around for a long, long time. And so we've tried to finance ourselves in a way that our partners can look at us and say they're going to be here to support me. And so a lot of it is just making sure we have a strong balance sheet to support our clients.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've announced a couple of acquisitions since then. We're about to close our acquisition of Hecher. Hechsher provides an EAP for annuities. So as I mentioned before, kind of the complete verticals. So that helps us complete our annuities vertical. So M&A will continue to be an important sort of use of cash. And we continue to sort of actively look at what's out there. We continue to grow organically, but the model is self-financing.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start when we were a couple of people. It's even more important than ever. And it probably continues to occupy a very significant percentage of my time in trying to get people working together, put people in the right seats for them to be successful, and creating simple ideas that people can rally around. I mention this earlier. Clients come first. What is it we need to do to help our clients succeed? And everything we do we have to do together. Those two things are really unifying to our culture.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a combination of things. It's time to market, it's culture. You know, everything that we have purchased, we've made 24 acquisitions. Everything that we've purchased, we've integrated. And to me, that's really important because if the goal is to provide an integrated solution for advisors and GPs, if you don't integrate the things you buy, you're not really doing that.1. And point two, if the people who join are an integrated, then it doesn't work either, right? It's not just about technology. It's actually more about the people. And so spending a lot of time on culture and trying to figure out how do you bring things together? How do you create what I often refer to as OneI capital is really critical? And I would say as time has evolved, I was always very focused on culture from the very”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. It was really a green field, which is why I say we're sort of enabling, not disruptive. And the truth is that, you know, we're still scratching the surface. I mean, BCG does a report every year and they look at global wealth. So last year, in December, they put out a report that said there's 153 trillion dollars in wealth owned by individuals. That's a huge number. It rivals the size of the institutional market. So there is a massive number of dollars that today, you know, in the US, I think the estimates are something like two, two, two and a half percent allocated to alts outside the United States. It's even less. There's a significant amount of wealth that is going to be looking to build even more sophisticated portfolios. So tools, technology, AI, tokenization, all of these things have to evolve to create”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think a lot of what people want help with out of the gate is just how do you build these portfolios? And we talked about education, but how do you build the portfolio? How do you construct portfolios that help match what an advisor's, what a client's goals and objectives are? So we've built technology to do that, which include all structured investments, annuities along with all the liquid products that they might need. And then the ability, one of the things we've tried to do as an organization is not only build an end-to-end solution out for alts, but do the same thing for structured investments because those are important products for”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the same thing. The adoption's a little bit behind the U.S. adoption. On our platform, you know, in the alt space, we have over $65 billion of alternatives allocated from investors who live outside of the United States. Half of our 20 offices are outside the United States. We think it's a really important growth area for the market and our business. But I think a lot of the same things that drive advisors to introduce these products to clients, potential for incremental return, portfolio diversification, et cetera, are the same types of things that drive international interest as well.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We believe that models will be a very important way in which people invest in alternatives. And that might mean models of just alternatives that get married to an otherwise liquid portfolio, or models that include both liquid and illiquid investments together. We have brought both those types of products in partnerships with some managers into the market as well as partnerships with the infrastructure players. But I think models will represent an important way in which advisors allocate client assets to alternatives.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think education is still a very important issue for advisors. And if you think about where we are, a lot of the advisors in the mix have been doing it for a while. There are still a lot of advisors who haven't really gotten into these products yet. And so they're going to need more education. Point two, how they invest is probably going to be different. So for example, a lot of advisors use models with respect to their liquid portfolios.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“either redeem all of it if there's not a big queue or redeem up to 5% if you need to. I think that's a flexibility and a liquidity feature in the wrapper, but it doesn't mean the product is liquid. And people should invest thinking that these products are going to solve an investment need they have that's medium to long term, not short-term.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People should buy these, make these investments because they think they're going to provide medium to long-term positive impact in their portfolio. If you're buying it to get return this quarter or next quarter, it's probably not the right investment. I'm not a financial advisor, but you need to buy these things with the right duration in your mind. And that's not a short one. The products do provide what I think of as liquidity features, opportunities. If things change in your life to potentially”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illiquid Securities, whether illiquid investments, whether they're wrapped as a 3C7 private fund, which are clearly illiquid, or they're wrapped in an evergreen wrapper, registered fund. The underlying investments are still a liquid. Now, some are shorter duration and others, private credit is shorter duration than private equity or real estate. But the fact is that private credit investment is still an illiquid investment. The problem, I think, is when they get wrapped in A rapper that says you can sell up to or redeem up to 5% that confuses people. It confuses people. And I think when the industry uses terms like semi-liquid, I don't even know what that means, semi-liquid.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, look, I think it is a journey. There's no one answer to that question. And by the way, we spend a ton of time and energy on education. And as do most of the GPs in our system, when you look at the documents around some of these funds, it isn't on page 98 in small print, the sort of liquidity rules, if you will, are on the front page, right? So it's, you know, I think the reality is. People want to hear what they want to hear, right? These are”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what do you think technology is essential to actually creating an experience that allows you to deal with all of those things effectively and in a way that will be encouraging to you to do the business with your clients where it makes sense? So everything from what happens before you make any decisions, education, maybe you as an advisor on the asset class, maybe education for your client, the tools to help you build a portfolio, research to help you learn about funds. And then once you've worked with the client and developed a portfolio perspective, tools to help you subscribe, and then automation to help you manage all the things that happen post-investment.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were trying to help the advisors who had left, as I mentioned, left their homes to start off their new businesses. And we felt like we could actually create for them an investment platform to allow them to be able to service their clients consistent with how they had previously served them.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really very much an advisor business. We are very focused on helping financial advisors serve their clients. It's not a B2C model. It's a B2B to C model. And so really all the clients at iCapital are advisors. Endor, obviously the GPs that are trying to reach those advisors. And so for financial advisors, if they're large, we can build a whole white label capability for them so they can in effect have an operating system to run their alts structured investments or annuities business as well as the data aggregation that they have to do for clients with information that's everywhere. For advisors that are maybe a little smaller that don't have sort of a persistent need, they can come to our marketplace and see a menu of hundreds of funds where they can avail themselves of those funds for their clients.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they didn't have technology. And so we felt like we could offer them a full technology platform. And we basically sort of rethought our role, if you will, in the ecosystem to be one where we were going to serve advisors. Wherever and however they choose to practice, we wanted to be able to serve them end to end. And that's allowed us, I think, to be able to serve advisors at the wirehouses, advisors who are RIAs or at IBDs, and really help create a great experience for them and for their clients.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's a big, and we'll come back to this experience point, but we felt like firms that were independent really needed a technology chassis. They needed access to product. They needed education diligence, and they needed a technology platform. We felt like we could build that. End-to-end, not just the diligence or not just fund sales or whatever. It was the whole end-to-end solution. And we started to build that out. And we realized that, you know, it was something that clients really needed. The other really interesting thing that we found out along the way, and I would say this was not a pivot as much as an expansion, we had assumed that the wirehouses had absolutely everything they need because they knew every manager in the world. They had close relationships. What they didn't really have at the time was much technology. They had a lot of people who were doing a great job serving advisors.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like think about some of your clients and what types of products they're interested in buying. So when you leave, the wire houses did a phenomenal job and still do of providing outstanding products, support, services. They do a great job. And so when somebody leaves to be independent, they don't have a platform. So we felt like we could create a platform to help advisors have access to alts in the right way. And it's different because at that moment in time, there was no technology. Investing in Alts was a highly manual process.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then with a great group of folks, we looked at what was happening in the independence space, a space you obviously know quite well. We saw a lot of firms, a lot of advisors sort of going off and starting their own firms. And that trend was significant. There were hundreds of billions or early trillions of dollars that were now being managed by these independent RIAs. And one of the things that we looked at was almost by definition, the biggest, the firms who were leaving were the firms with the largest asset bases. And generally speaking, the largest clients. And those clients typically invested in alts. And so, as we thought about it, we thought”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably we weren't smart enough to figure that out. So anyway, so we put that on pause and actually it was a little bit of an unplanned cleansing in a sense that I coached my kids football teams and lacrosse teams and I worked kind of from home. And it was actually very exciting. Did a few entrepreneurial things.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it reminds me of the Leslie Nielsen joke in airplane. I picked a bad month to stop sniff and glue. So there was a little of that. We went off to start a private equity fund in the middle of the GFC.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the real story is I left in 07 and with one of my former partners, we were going to start a technology buyout fund. You may remember there were some events in 07 and 08 that were not too pleasant. Don't really recall something like GFC.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is always ahead of the reality. I think there's a little of that right now. But AI is a massively important trend. We're spending a lot of money on it, as are lots of companies. But I think you've got to be willing to sort of adopt or run the risk of dying.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than a lot of the client server companies got displaced with the internet. And now you're seeing another interesting potential risk of displacement. And I think one of the big things is you cannot be afraid of new changes in technology waves. You've got to adopt it. You can't, by the way, some companies, if you remember back when Amazon was growing and many of the borders, the bookstores, the music stores, et cetera, hope is not a strategy, right? You can't hope this is going to go away. You've got to adopt it even if it means you got to change your business. Even if it means your business model has got to sort of change and maybe your margins aren't going to be the same as what they were, you've got to adopt to new technology. Now, the one thing I would say is this always takes a little longer than people think. You know, it's not like you snap your fingers, the hype.”
2026-05-01 · Masters in Business · Building 'The World's Alternative Investment Marketplace' with Lawrence Calcano · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source